The Right to Bed-Stuy
Can a Brooklyn community reclaim its brownstones from neoliberalism’s clutch?
It’s an unseasonably hot autumn day, about 25 degrees Celsius. I turn from Franklin Avenue onto Hancock Street, hugged tight by imposing four-storey Italianate brownstone terraces that frame each side of the road. Stoops worn smooth by decades of hard footsteps on soft sandstone seem to whisper secrets from a storied past, as they rise above ornate cast-iron black railings that line the weathered grey sidewalk. It’s almost Halloween and many of the frontages, set back from the street, are dressed in suitably spooky paraphernalia. Brownstones seem made for this holiday, as though their architects anticipated the dressing of orange pumpkins and faux spider cobweb decoration when designing those mud-coloured facades.
Honey locust trees have shed their wares: small yellow leaves and dark brown pod husks lay strewn across the old concrete slabs in front of me, softly crunching underfoot. Perhaps this explains the unfamiliar fragrance gently caressing my foreign nostrils. It’s Tuesday 29th October 2024, exactly one week before election day. At each intersection, as I head east along Hancock, I hear the distant thud of bass-heavy music and the occasional car horn beep, blending with the muffled sighs of buses that pull over to pick up passengers on Fulton Street; where a teenage Christopher Wallace used to sell crack before he made it big – Biggie Smalls big. By contrast, here on Hancock I’m virtually alone and the street is still. Just me and the ghosts. But this Indian summer air feels thick with quiet tension. Beneath stone-carved ornamental lintels, some windows have dark blue posters displaying the name HARRIS, with WALZ in slightly smaller font underneath. Below that an instruction: “Text JOIN to 30330” … join what exactly, I wonder. My thoughts turn to next week’s vote. Could something eerie be stirring?
Brownstone architecture has become integral to how we both perceive and conceive of this captivating slice of Brooklyn, whose street names honour legendary black leaders like Marcus Garvey and Malcolm X, alongside old Dutchmen and Robert Fulton, the celebrated engineer and inventor. The brownstones themselves resonate, serving as a ‘hook’ to hang community activism around and as a key feature of how Bed-Stuy is represented in popular culture. This is particularly evident in films like Spike Lee’s 1989 classic Do the Right Thing, much of the memorialisation of 1980s and 1990s hip hop music, or even more explicitly through initiatives like Brownstone Jazz.
I turn left at Tompkins Avenue, which is not just a street but an experience pulsing through the heart of Bed-Stuy. In summer weekends Tompkins is barricaded-off as an ‘open-street’ where drum bands march, jerk chicken sizzles on BBQs, and those that know the steps join impromptu line-dances that break out to Beyoncé’s cover of Before I Let Go. Even on a quieter autumn afternoon, Tompkins Avenue is brimming with an eclectic mix of old Caribbean influences, regulation NYC corner delis, new ‘bougie’ life. The tantalising aroma of artisan coffee percolates from a narrow café staffed by hipsters; boutiques sell non-high street garments. It’s a living, breathing testament to the resilience and soul of Bed-Stuy coexisting with the new reality. And, at each cross section, yet more avenues of seemingly endless brownstone rows.
Today those almost fairytale chocolate facades betray a very real story of what we call 21st century gentrification; of ‘real estate’ now beyond the reach of ordinary folk. This is in stark contrast to the recent past, when Bed-Stuy’s brownstones came to symbolise New York City’s emerging black middle class. Today, the brownstones still stand proud, but they’ve become a symbol of a contested space; of economic displacement. It is here, in this shifting urban landscape, this enclave of the most archetypal of the world’s neoliberal cities, that Henri Lefebvre’s theorising on space and power finds clear expression.
In his 1974 book, The Production of Space, Lefebvre argued that urban environments are not merely physical landscapes but social products shaped by power structures. According to Lefebvre, space is not neutral; it is created, controlled, and contested by those who wield economic and political influence. Lefebvre identified three dimensions for considering space: spatial practices (our use of space in daily life); representations of space (maps and policies like zoning laws, shaping the urban environment); and representational spaces (our lived experience and the cultural significance we attach to place). Bedford-Stuyvesant provides as clear a case study as any for applying Lefebvre’s analysis to post-industrial western society.
“I own this brownstone”
By the early mid-20th century Bed-Stuy had become a predominantly African American community, following the Great Migration from the Jim Crow segregated southern states. During the 1930s, Lefebvre’s second dimension for considering space – representations of space – came into play through the redlining maps drawn by the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (ironically created as part of Roosevelt’s New Deal). These maps designated Black neighbourhoods as “high-risk” areas, ensuring that banks would deny mortgages to residents within the boundaries. This resulted in capital flowing elsewhere, deepening cycles of disinvestment. It served to perpetuate historic, structural inequality; effectively racializing poverty. Despite this, African American residents cultivated their own representational space through vibrant cultural and political institutions – from the jazz clubs that hosted Max Roach and Miles Davis, to the formation of the Bedford-Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation. However, the structural barriers imposed by redlining ensured that Bed-Stuy remained economically left behind relative to other parts of New York City.
Through Lefebvre’s framework, redlining can be viewed not merely as an act of financial exclusion but a deliberate production of space designed to concentrate poverty and limit social mobility for a particular demographic of society. The brownstones that now sell for millions of dollars were once long neglected by landlords who knew their tenants had few alternatives. Many brownstones fell into disrepair as housing conditions for Bed-Stuy’s residents worsened, against a wider backdrop of social decay. This was not an unfortunate accident, but the direct consequence of space being produced to serve the interests of one group over another.
Further up Tompkins Avenue I reach Herbert Von King Park. Near the amphitheatre in the centre of the park, a DJ with a mobile sound system spins old soulful house. The music seems to be trying to cling to the area’s identity at each beat. On a less profound level, it makes me smile at the memory of my younger self dancing to those tunes in London nightclubs. Those days are gone though.
The ghosts of the past linger in the musical notes, the chipped sandstone cornices of nearby brownstones and faded murals … but so does the future emerge – in the laughter of children in the play park, the teenagers playing basketball, the woman in a headwrap swaying her young baby to the music. Our eyes meet; we both smile and produce the nod exchanged between two strangers who recognise each other not by name, but by presence and experience. Here in this park, beneath the rustling trees and the gentle hum of city beyond, Bed-Stuy endures. Here Bed-Stuy feels like it still belongs to us – we the people, us – as though by inalienable right.
The reality, however, is that no such right to this place currently exists. Lefebvre was an extraordinarily prolific writer. One of his earlier works, The Right to the City, is another essential guide to understanding contemporary urbanism. Here Lefebvre argued that we should not merely live in cities but actively participate in shaping them. He critiqued the tendency to create cities as spaces of consumption rather than lived community experiences. The notion of a right to the city is not just about physical access to spaces; it is a question of who has power and control. It is about who has a say in how a city develops; what a neighbourhood looks like, who it serves, and who benefits from regeneration and development.
Today, like so many other urban communities, Bedford-Stuyvesant is being reshaped. But for whom? The brownstones are prime real estate and the neighbourhood’s cultural vibrancy, once overlooked, is now commodified as part of any realtor’s sales pitch (I once made the mistake of typing “Brooklyn brownstones” into a YouTube search, hoping to uncover some architectural history documentaries). According to Zillow data, since the turn of this century, the median home price in Bedford-Stuyvesant has surged from just over $200,000 to well over $1million ($1.21million in 2023). That’s a more than 400% increase in two decades. A full 5-bedroom plus townhouse will easily cost three or four times this median price.
Renters have also been squeezed. According to NYU Furman Center, median gross rent in Bedford Stuyvesant increased from $1,050 in 2006 to $1,950 in 2022. It has jumped further since, pricing out long-time residents. Zumper has the current median rental price at $3,075 per month – and closer to $4,000 for a 2-bed apartment. With median household income in Bed-Stuy at $77,146, a large number of people will be spending half of their income or more just on rent alone.
And so, the cruel irony is that the ending of redlining ultimately didn’t liberate Bed-Stuy’s residents. Instead, from 1975’s near bankruptcy of New York City onwards, they got the neoliberal economic model – free markets, privatisation, deregulation and shrinking of the state. This led to the dominance of an ideology that doesn’t acknowledge itself as an ideology, instead acting invisibly as though it were some law of nature controlling increasingly more aspects of our lives. As Gordon Gekko taught us in Oliver Stone’s Wall Street, greed became good and the selfish pursuit of wealth accumulation would somehow, magically, make the world a better place. This encouraged housing market bubbles built on cheap debt and predatory speculation. Such marketisation has not only broken the housing system – a public good – but should been seen as a clear symbol of a wider political/ economic philosophy that is a dud. It never worked at all.
We need a new way of organising our economies; to create viable societies in which equitable prosperity can be sustained in every community across New York City and beyond. But what form should that model take; and why is there no serious discussion of this amongst leading politicians or in our mainstream media? I doubt that texting JOIN to 30330 would have provided any answers.
Historically, Bed-Stuy’s residents asserted their right to the city through activism, from the 1960s civil rights movement to community-driven housing. Yet, as property values skyrocket, their claim to Bed-Stuy is systematically eroded. Rent hikes, predatory buyouts, and rezoning laws favouring developers create a new representation of space, in which the urban landscape is reimagined for wealthier newcomers. A decade before my Bed-Stuy sojourn, across the East River in Manhattan, Zadie Smith wrote:
There’s a reason so many writers once lived here, beyond the convenient laundromats and the take-out food, the libraries and cafés. We have always worked off the energy generated by this town, the money-making and tower-building as much as the street art and underground cultures. Now the energy is different: the underground has almost entirely disappeared. (You hope there are still young artists in Washington Heights, in the Barrio, or Stuyvesant Town, but how much longer can they hang on?) A twisted kind of energy radiates instead off the soul cycling mothers and marathon-running octogenarians, the entertainment lawyers glued to their iPhones and the moguls building five “individualized” condo townhouses where once there was a hospital.
Smith asked back then: “what comes next?” She argued that we could deceive ourselves into, “thinking of Manhattan as an isle of writers and artists – of downtown underground wildlings and uptown intellectuals – against all evidence to the contrary.” She concluded: “they are all of them, every single last one of them, in Brooklyn.”
A few short years later, they are fast disappearing from Brooklyn too. Anecdotally, I seem to know an ever-expanding pool of people who have crossed both the East River and then the Hudson into Jersey City and further inland, to avoid Brooklyn’s rent hikes. They have moved out to the periphery to commute in to work in New York City; to produce urban life in a place they have been priced out of.
Building on Lefebvre, CUNY’s David Harvey argues that the right to the city should be understood through how our public spheres can be moulded by “the exercise of a collective power to reshape the processes of urbanization” rather than merely being a ‘right’ to access the public services a city provides. So, to achieve a collective vision of urban life, we need some form of collective resistance. This has taken the shape of grassroots movements fighting back against displacement. An example of this is the coalition of activist organisations formed under the Right to the City Alliance, which has mobilised to demand tenant protections, fight against luxury developments, and preserve affordable housing. This movement deserves more attention – and support – than it gets.
In Bed-Stuy, local residents have championed urban agriculture and land reclamation as tools of resistance. Across Marcy Avenue from the impromptu house music party I’m treated to at Herbert Von King Park, the Hattie Carthan Community Garden stands as a powerful example of community-led spatial production. It is named after Carthan, a local resident environmentalist who helped found the Bedford-Stuyvesant Neighborhood Tree Corps in 1971 as a way to teach young people how to care for trees, later becoming chairwoman of the Bedford-Stuyvesant Beautification Committee. This initiative eventually added more than 1,500 trees to the neighbourhood. The community garden itself, once a neglected lot, has been transformed into a vibrant hub where residents grow food, organise educational programmes, and assert a degree of agency and control over local development. Through these efforts, long-time Bed-Stuy residents continue to reclaim their right to the city. They show how we can be active producers of space and urban life.
Despite these green shoots, a depressing irony is inescapable. The very culture that was born during (and often in response to) Bedford-Stuyvesant’s ‘redlined’ subjugation – its jazz clubs, block parties, and deep communal ties – is now leveraged as a selling point for those displacing its long-term residents. In Lefebvre’s terms, this is the abstract space of capitalism, where lived experience and history is overwritten by the need to extract profit. Whereas in the late 1980s Biggie Smalls selling crack on Fulton Street was considered a menace to society, today his story has become a commodity for realtors to exploit.
As the day draws to an end, the sky’s shade begins to turn but the brownstones remain constant. However, I study them closely and start to notice the variations in detailing: their hues are not uniform and their style can change from one row to the next. Some have decorative brackets beneath the roofline, others don’t. Some have mansard slate roofs, most are flat. Some are not even clad in a sheet of brownstone at all, but are exposed brick with only the brownstone itself evident in doorway and window lintels.
To spend any time strolling through Bed-Stuy, neighbouring Clinton Hill and Fort Greene, or further beyond in Brooklyn Heights, is to be treated to the full plethora of brownstone styles, charting the history of 19th century Brooklyn architecture. The earlier Greek Revivals are easy to identify, as are the later Romanesque Revivals or Queen Annes, whose bay windows remind me of the Victorian terraces I grew up with back across the Atlantic. I find it can get tricky distinguishing a Second Empire from an Italianate with any confidence. The tall, narrow windows of the Neo-Grecs, like the Greek Revivals, seem more austere, angular and masculine compared to the more ornate curved detailing of Italianate window mouldings. However, the later Italianates, like the ones I saw earlier on Hancock Street, can seem to fuse with the Neo-Grecs.
I try to test my self-taught knowledge on the styles as I walk back in the direction of Prospect Lefferts Gardens, where I’m staying. Much of it is still guesswork for me. What becomes less puzzling than my nascent architectural acumen is the clear sense that I’m traversing a contested territory; navigating power, history, and a sense of belonging. With each step my walk starts to feel like it’s been a quest all along. I study these buildings, but why? What am I seeking clues for?
It dawns on me: I’d love to figure out how communities can reclaim these urban spaces and architecture. This is the quest that has emerged from my afternoon stroll through this charming pocket of Brooklyn. In short, I need to search for ways in which those who are ‘left-behind’ can take the initiative to shape their futures; and in so doing, create a sense of power through agency. A quarter of the way into the 21st century, I believe it imperative that communities fight back and protect themselves from drowning under the waves of privatisation engulfing our metropolises. We should not, in my view, allow our great cities to be exclusive playgrounds for the rich.
My hunt for solutions led me to Lefebvre, who taught us that space is never passive. The brownstone avenues of Bed-Stuy, once marked by exclusion and later reclaimed through community resilience, have in recent years faced a new wave of spatial production: driven by capital rather than culture; in what has come to be known as ‘gentrification’ in the common vernacular. If the right to the city is worth having, it is worth fighting for. That fight starts with community; it should be channelled through the collective reimagining of urban life itself.
I walk on and peer up at the now lit windows of these enchanting dwellings whose original purpose was shelter, not financial speculation. I wonder, whose brownstones will these be in the decades to come? Who will they belong to … and who will belong in this place?
References:
Lefebvre, Henri. (1991). The Production of Space (translated by D. Nicholson-Smith). Cambridge, MA: Blackwell
Lefebvre, Henri. (1968). Le Droit à la ville (2nd ed.). Paris, France: Anthropos
Smith, Zadie. “Find Your Beach”. The New York Review of Books, October 23, 2014 issue
Harvey, David. "The Right to the City". New Left Review, 2008. II (53): 23
